When the Cloud Has a Cough: Why Amazon’s Four-Hour Nap Isn’t the End of the World

At around 8 a.m. this morning, Amazon’s AWS decided to have a little lie-down.
By midday, it started to wake up again, blinking blearily and trying to remember what it was supposed to be doing.

In those few hours, the internet collectively lost its mind.
Because when AWS sneezes, half the world catches a cold.

Xero, Canva, Disney World, Lloyds Bank, big names with very different services, all tied into the same digital backbone. Some couldn’t log in, some saw error messages, some just stared at spinning wheels of doom. The result? A glorious morning of chaos, coffee, and social media outrage.

“This is why I don’t trust the cloud!”

Ah yes, the battle cry of the frustrated user.
“This is why I like my data on my own computer.”
Sure. Because your computer never goes wrong, does it?

Let’s rewind a bit.

You could absolutely go old-school.
Buy Sage Line 50 for £1,200 a year. One user, local install, pure 2003 nostalgia.
Then your database corrupts. You send a backup to Sage support. They “look into it” for a week.
When they send it back, you re-import, realise half your invoices vanished, and spend another few hours re-entering them manually.

That’s not resilience. That’s Stockholm syndrome with extra paperwork.

Meanwhile, people scream that Xero was down for four hours.
Four.
Hours.

Four hours where the Amazon engineers, an army of the most caffeinated technicians in existence, worked to get thousands of services back online.
Four hours out of an entire year, when they maintain data centres that could probably survive a zombie apocalypse.

Compare that to your average small business PC: a cup of tea spilt, a dodgy Windows update, one failed hard drive, and you’re out for days. Possibly weeks.

The myth of “my own server would be safer”

Let’s do some quick maths.

Running your own accounting software on your own server means:

• Buying hardware (and maybe a second one for redundancy)

• Paying for support and software updates

• Managing backups (and remembering to actually take them)

• Storing a second copy off-site, because fires, theft, and floods don’t care about your spreadsheets

Most businesses won’t do that. Because it’s expensive, boring, and time-consuming.
So they risk everything on one PC sitting under a desk, humming away next to a hoover socket and a radiator.

Meanwhile, cloud systems are monitored 24/7, patched daily, and built to survive major regional power failures. And when something does go wrong, the fix is typically hours, not weeks.

But sure, tell me again how the cloud isn’t safe.

What we really learned today

Here’s a fun thought:
What if today’s AWS outage was an opportunity rather than a disaster?

Couldn’t get into Xero? Fine. Call a few clients instead.
Canva not working? Grab a notebook and brainstorm new ideas.
CRM down? Go tidy your email inbox or chase some invoices.

Every “I can’t” could have been turned into “Well, I may as well finally…”

Because the truth is, we’ve become addicted to uptime. We expect every service, app, and toaster to be available now. And when it’s not, we act like civilisation has fallen.

Newsflash: nothing collapsed today.
Nobody’s business was destroyed because Canva had a wobble.
But we did get a timely reminder that even the internet’s biggest players aren’t invincible, and that’s okay.

So… what happens when you go down?

You can rage-tweet at Amazon all you like, but here’s the real question:
If your business lost access to a key system for four hours, could you adapt?
Or would everything grind to a halt?

If you were off sick for a day, what would still function?
If your internet went out for an afternoon, could you still deliver something useful?

Downtime will always exist, whether it’s a failed hard drive, a power cut, or an AWS blip. The question isn’t if it happens, but how prepared you are when it does.

Final Thought

If today’s AWS outage made you sweat, that’s your sign to look at your own backup, redundancy, and continuity plans. Because no matter how big or small your setup is, resilience doesn’t happen by accident, it’s designed.

At TLMartin Ltd, our Managed Partnership clients don’t just use cloud systems, they understand them, plan for them, and recover from them. If you want that same confidence the next time the internet hiccups, let’s talk.

Get in touch with TLMartin Ltd – and let’s make sure your systems (and your sanity) stay online, whatever happens.